The Byron Writers Festival has announced a number of prize-winning authors who will be appearing among 150 international and Australian writers at this year’s festival, representing a wide range of genres.
Notable non-fiction
Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family by Micaela Sahhar won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and the award for New Writing in the NSW Literary Awards.
Marika Sosnowski was shortlisted for the 2026 Stella Prize and the 2026 Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction in the NSW Literary Awards for 58 Facets: On Law, Violence and Revolution weaving together the narratives of Holocaust survivors and Israeli war criminals with Syrian activists, revolutionaries and dissenters.
Prize-winning poetry
Ender Başkan won the Anne Elder Award 2025 for his collection Two Hundred Million Musketeers on the complexities of new parenthood and family life, and was shortlisted in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Winner of the annual black&write! fellowship, Bundjalung and Gumbaynggirr man Dakota Feirer explores the legacy of generational trauma and the cultural wisdom of First Nations people in Arsenic Flower, which was also shortlisted for the ACT Literary Awards for Poetry.
Booker Prize winners
Richard Flanagan returns to the festival with Heresies, and notably won the 2014 Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, while Indian author Geetanjali Shree won the 2022 International Booker Prize with her American translator Daisy Rockwell, as well as the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, for her novel Tomb of Sand.
Steve Toltz’s (A Rising of the Lights) iconic first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008.
Stella stars
Evelyn Araluen (The Rot) won the 2022 Stella Prize with Dropbear and was shortlisted for the premier’s awards in NSW, Queensland and Victoria.
Boonwurrung woman Tasma Walton appears with her heart-wrenching novel I Am Nannertgarrook, shortlisted for this year’s Stella and winner of the 2025 ARA Historical Novel Prize.
Fiona Wright brings her hotly anticipated novel on housing inequality Kill Your Boomers. Her book Small Acts of Disappearance was shortlisted for the Stella in 2016 and won the NSW Premier’s Prize.
Miles Franklin luminaries
Shortlisted for the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Steve MinOn appears at the festival with his darkly ironic novel First Name Second Name.
Melissa Lucashenko returns with Not Quite White in the Head. She previously won the Miles Franklin for Too Much Lip, while her extraordinary Edenglassie won the VPLA for Fiction and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a work of State Significance, among other accolades.
The Byron Writers Festival runs in Byron Bay from 14-16 August this year.
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